Policy can present any number of wicked problems for arts educators and advocates. The complexity of policy accompanied by a general lack of policy dexterity fuels the legitimacy gap between advocacy arguments and policy implementation and, thus, weakens the arts in the education policy realm. To help close the gap, common weak arguments in policy…

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 2016 about 1 in 5 children in the United Stated lives in poverty (19%) Students in our music classrooms and ensembles do not begin life from the same starting line. They come from homes and communities that are vastly different. The intersections of poverty, disability, racial…

This article describes the role of the culture coordinator in general formal education, in primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands. This article describes how they function in their professional environment and in contact with artists, providers of educational programs, and cultural institutions. In order to describe the everyday practice…

This article troubles the notion of "disturbance" in relation to teacher-artist identities within partnerships delivering arts education in schools. As such, a visiting artist/teaching artist entering an educational setting "alters" the space and forces the negotiation of professional (and personal) identities. These…

In less than a decade, Pearson's distribution of the Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) has expanded to hundreds of teacher education preparation programs in the United States. Used in more than forty states, the edTPA has become one of the most prevalent forms of high-stakes evaluation for student teachers, with several states requiring…

As Seattle and the United States grapple with COVID-19, police brutality, and racial inequity, a teaching artist, a leader from a youth-focused cultural organization, and a representative from a city agency each explain, from their unique perspective, why teaching artists are essential workers. They also explore the local arts/culture, education,…

This paper presents a background of the rates at which educators, teaching artists, college students, retirees, parents, and the public attend arts programs in their schools and communities. The researcher circulated a 19-question online survey to measure the rates of attendance to visual and performing arts events, such as music, dance, arts…

In recent years, arts education has become a focus of some school improvement efforts, with consistent evidence emerging that vibrant arts programs can improve factors commonly listed as goals in school improvement plans, including engagement, attendance, and school climate. Such models mainly make use of arts integration, an approach that marries…

This paper presents a critical policy analysis of how anti-political education reforms impact arts education. I consider examples of educational policies--both within arts education and outside the arts--to analyze how arts education may be impacted by anti-politics. I argue that many arts education policy outcomes can be understood as indirectly…

This article reviews the field of research and practice for arts Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) assessment. We propose areas and types of research that are needed and share the University of Wisconsin-Madison Community Arts Collaboratory as a model of mixed methodological approaches and results for developing and implementing assessments of arts…

There is scant evidence on the level of arts education available in U.S. public schools and how this has changed over time. In this paper, I present new evidence on broad trends in arts education in U.S. public schools from 1988 through 2018 using nationally representative data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the National Teachers…

In this article, we apply the concept of systemness to music and arts teacher professional development (PD), arguing that to address perennial issues of access and scale, PD policy should be understood as a systems issue. Using systems theory as a lens and the robust and integrated PD system in Singapore as an exemplar, we address the following…

Governments and funding agencies increasingly expect researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work not only within the academy but also for a range of stakeholders beyond academia. Whilst arts researchers have tended to resist impact measurement, in this article, we will describe one form of demonstrating impact, namely through writing…

The meanings and value of the arts and their impact on students' learning have long been main areas of focus in arts education research. In Hong Kong, there are only a few studies discussing the impact of performing arts education on students' learning, which leaves a gap in the overall understanding of performing arts education. This article…

Teaching artists typically work as solo agents, without the comradery of a like-minded community. After a year of focus groups, teaching observations, and conversations with school and arts administrators, we identified a need for experienced teaching artists to have a chance to reflect upon, renew, and reconsider their teaching practices with…